BSIT200

This week we discussed the ins and outs of networking. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) I am also taking BSIT 220 this semester which goes over networking in depth, and all of the topics discussed this week have already been gone over in much more depth within that class, so I was unable to gain much value from this week.  One thing I will say is: I find it funny that Michael Meyers, the author of both the A+ and Networking+ textbooks we're reading, just copy and pasted a lot of the information from one to the other (though I'm not sure which came first) to help the writing process go along quicker. 

Chapter 17 in this week’s readings talked about the different display technologies in use today, and specifically on page 691 talks about OLED technology being a little bit of a niche product. I guess I can’t argue that the price-point of most of the OLED monitors and TVs kind of forces themselves into a niche corner, I am one of the lucky ones who have taken the plunge into OLED territory, and I don’t think I’ll be getting out of the pool any time soon. As Meyers mentioned in the book, one of the issues that plagues OLED screens is burn-in. Back in the days with CRT burn in happened when a static image was left on a screen too long and started degrading the phosphorus coating on the screen which didn’t allow light to be absorbed as well. OLED burn-in is very similar in that the organic LEDs that are used more often will eventually not be able to produce as much light. In both cases, when burn-in occurs there will be a faint permanent ‘shadow’ on the screen wherever the phosphorus/...

One of the first important tasks I was assigned when I started my current job was learning how Active Directory worked to be able to add and remove new and leaving employees as necessary. Thankfully either Active Directory is not that hard to understand and use, or our company’s implementation/use-case for AD was so simple that I was able to pick it up naturally. (Most likely the latter) File and folder sharing/permissions were up on the table next and thankfully those were also very simple to understand. We have since moved to the fully cloud based Entra ID and SharePoint/OneDrive to replace our on-prem AD and file servers, and it was a little bit of a learning curve but I have since figured out how to do everything I need with those and am constantly learning new things to do in Entra and Exchange Admin Center.

This week I would like to comment on how pleased I am with the state that the computer industry is making hardware simpler to install. Specifically hard drive or general storage installation. Back when I first started messing with computer hardware, IDE was thankfully already on its way out but having to figure out what jumpers you needed to set or not set and figure out why and having to deal with the flat and wide IDE cables that blocked airflow was just a PITA. Moving to SATA, which is a much better system, where each drive gets its own channel and doesn’t conflict with any other installed drives and of course comes with a speed upgrade that most generational improvements come with. With SATA drives, the only thing you must worry about are power and data cables. These days, even SATA is starting to go by the wayside, with the addition of M.2 drives which are much simpler to install than even SATA since the port provides power and data directly to the drive with no cabling. My cu...